Chapter 15
In This Chapter
● Getting on the bad side of Philip of Spain
● Defending the Dutch
● Singeing the king of Spain’s beard with Francis Drake
● Drumming the Armada up the Channel
The world was not enough for Philip II of Spain in the 1580s. He owned huge chunks of the world, his treasure ships prowled the seas and the 16th century was Spain’s siecle d’oro - golden century. But irritated by Elizabeth’s privateers (see Chapter 12), Philip was eventually forced into action when England backed the Dutch revolt against him in the Spanish Netherlands.
Elizabeth’s approach was cool and pragmatic, making stirring speeches to her troops and relying on the most brilliant seamen of the age - and bad weather - to destroy Philip’s Armada: the biggest invading fleet the world had ever seen.
Provoking Philip of Spain
The king of Spain was autocratic and pious and had no sense of humour. He was the most powerful man in the world in the 1580s, more than the president of the United States today because no one had elected him. He was king of Spain, the Netherlands and much of the New World because, he believed, God had put him on the throne, and he never let anyone forget it.
For much of his reign Philip was at war with France and the Ottoman Turks whom he regarded as something less than human because they weren’t Christian. But he knew Elizabeth personally, had once proposed to her, had been married to her sister (see Chapters 10 and 11) and had a grudging respect for her.
Walking a fine line
In Chapter 12 we introduce you to two seafarers: John Hawkins and Francis Drake. Hawkins had already annoyed the Spanish authorities in the New World, but he’d now settled down to become treasurer of the navy and to use his huge talents redesigning ships and reorganising the fleet. Drake, on the other hand, was still upsetting Spain’s apple cart by helping himself to loot in Spanish America.
The 1570s and 1580s were the decades in which Elizabeth turned a blind eye to the piracy of her seadogs, infuriating Spanish ambassadors sent by Philip to sort out the English privateers’ antics.
Elizabeth’s promise to Philip was half-hearted at best. In theory
● All unlicensed voyages must stop.
● All plundering of friendly ships must stop.
● All loot taken illegally must be handed over to the Lord Admiral’s Court in London.
All this was fine but in practice complications existed. Merchant ships had been armed for several years for their own protection on the seas and captains who were a long way from home and without any communication from land did their own thing, firing on foreign shipping as a matter of course.
Tightening up?
In July 1561 Elizabeth issued a proclamation giving special protection to the subjects of ‘her good brother’ of Spain and sent out a few warships to arrest and execute pirates. She gave the Bristol merchants a licence to use armed ships for their own protection (which may actually have increased violence on the high seas). In any case, Elizabeth’s instruction was too little, too late. The general trend was for captains to shoot first and sort it out with the lord admiral later.
By 1569 Elizabeth was distinguishing between acts of piracy that went along with foreign policy (attacks on Spanish ships) and acts of piracy that didn’t (attacks on anybody else).
The international waters were muddied, however, by what happened in December 1568. The English grabbed five ships out of Biscay laden with wool and 450,000 ducats of Spanish silver at Plymouth and Southampton on the orders of William Cecil, Elizabeth’s secretary of state. Technically, the treasure didn’t yet belong to Spain because it hadn’t got there, but nobody could pretend that this was the work of a rogue Devon seadog acting without orders miles from anywhere.
Stacking the deck in England's favour
By 1580 Philip believed that Elizabeth was challenging his naval and political supremacy. What was his evidence?
● Hawkins’ involvement in the Spanish-American slave trade (see Chapter 12).
● Drake’s attacks on Spanish-American colonies (see Chapter 12).
● John Dee, the queen’s astrologer (check him out in Chapter 17), suggested a huge fleet extension paid for by a tax on fishing. It didn’t happen, but the Spaniards knew the intention existed.
● Dee came up with the idea of a British Empire (one of half a dozen guys given this phrase as their own) that would include North America and threaten Philip’s claim to the New World.
● An increasing number of trading companies, like the East India Company, were being set up in the last quarter of the century, from Virginia to the Far East.
● English nobility were keen to invest in trading voyages. We see this with Hawkins (Chapter 12) and Martin Frobisher’s expeditions in the 1570s in search of a north-west passage to China (see Chapter 17 for more on Frobisher).
Spain and Portugal had dominated European and world trade for a century.
It looked now as if England was ready to take over.
Plotting in the Shadows
Take a look at Chapter 14 and all those plots against Elizabeth - Ridolfi in 1572; Throckmorton in 1583; Babington in 1586. In all of the plots, Philip and/or Spain appear somewhere. It’s almost as if, turned down by the queen as Philip was for marriage, he was determined to get her some other way; hell hath no fury like a king of Spain scorned.
How much did Philip actually know? Well, he had no interest in Mary Queen of Scots (see Chapters 13 and 14). And although Pope Gregory XIII sometimes spoke on Philip’s behalf because it sounded more threatening to Protestants, this doesn’t mean that Philip himself was in the know. How much Philip knew about the English depended on how well informed he was kept by his ambassadors in England. Until the 1580s Philip’s involvement and/or awareness didn’t matter and Elizabeth did her own thing in foreign policy.
Philip knew all about the Throckmorton Plot. He encouraged his ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, to complain to Elizabeth about Drake’s piracy (which annoyed her) and the man was sending secret, coded messages to Philip filling him in on events. But when Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham uncovered the Throckmorton Plot, de Mendoza was kicked out, marking the end to Spanish ambassadors in Elizabeth’s England.
Helping the Low Countries
The cold war between England and Spain might have gone on for years with acts of piracy, recriminations and the odd hanging. What happened in the Low Countries in the 1580s, however, turned a cold war into a hot one.
Figure 15-1 shows the area known today as the Netherlands as it was at the time before the rebellion against Spanish control. Note how close England is across the North Sea.
In 1548 Charles V, the Roman emperor (see Chapters 3 and 5), gave the Spanish Netherlands (the Burgundian Circle) to his son Philip, who was determined to introduce a strong Catholic government from Madrid.
Lording it over the Low Countries
When Philip became king of Spain in 1556 he set up his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, as regent in the Netherlands and sent his right-hand man, Cardinal Granvelle, to hold her hand.
The Burgundian Circle
In the 16th century people called what's Holland or the Netherlands today the Burgundian Circle. It was made up of 17 provinces, each with its own economy, customs and local government called estates. The south, which included Flanders, Brabant and Hainault, were Frenchspeaking and rich; the great cloth-trading centres of Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent were among the wealthiest cities in the world. Many people here were Catholics.
In the northern provinces like Holland and Zeeland, farming was the usual occupation, poverty was harsh and most people spoke a kind of low German. Those nearest the coast were fishermen and there were large numbers of Protestants who objected to any kind of central government control. In theory, the Estates General was in overall control of all the provinces, but its powers were vague and nobody took much notice.
Granvelle had two priorities: to stamp out heresy (all forms of Protestantism) and to set up a strong, centralised Catholic government. Not unnaturally, the locals complained: Protestants were outraged at these big brother tactics and nobles realised they’d lost their power.
Margaret was caught between a rock and a hard place. She was forced to sack Granvelle, but when she tried to give even more concessions to the Dutch Philip recalled her and sent in the hard-line duke of Alba (plus troops) instead.
Figure 15-1: The North Sea and the Netherlands.
With this iron fist approach, many Dutchmen fled to England and set themselves up as pirates, attacking Spanish and Flemish ships in the Channel. During a thaw in the Anglo-Spanish cold war, Elizabeth kicked them out in 1572 while she negotiated with Philip.
Not to be outdone, the sea beggars, as they’re known, crossed the sea again and set up operations from Brill, harassing Alba and threatening to link up with France - a two-pronged front that Philip dreaded. The actions of these lawless renegades kick started the Revolt of the Netherlands.
Revolting in the Netherlands
Clashes went on between Dutch rebels and Alba’s troops for four years and by 1580 the battle lines were drawn. Ten southern states (including what’s Belgium today) stood with Spain; seven northern states decided to carry on the fight for independence. English volunteers had been fighting for some time on the rebel side, either for pay or the hell of it, and Elizabeth had done nothing to discourage this.
Elizabeth was given a chance in 1581 to become queen of the rebel provinces, but (sensibly) turned it down. It would have meant a head-on clash with Philip. Events hotted up three years later with the assassination of the rebel commander of the United Provinces, William of Orange, known as the Silent (for more on William and his death, see the nearby sidebar ‘Silencing the Silent (eventually!).
Silencing the Silent (eventually!)
Philip and the pope had wanted William the Silent dead for some time and a bounty of 25,000 crowns was on the table for the right man.
Jean Jaureguy had a go, shooting William in the head in Antwerp in March 1582. Remarkably, William survived (although ironically his wife, nursing him, died of a fever). Another attempted hit followed in March of the following year and William moved to Delft for greater safety. Thirteen months later Hans Hanszoom from
Vlissingen tried to blow William up, but that didn't work.
Finally, posing as a poor Calvinist refugee, Balthasar Gerard from Burgundy wormed his way in to see William and shot him three times, finally getting the job done. The Spanish authorities saw to it that Gerard's parents got the reward when their son suffered a ghastly and lingering death in front of a huge crowd. Rejoicing Catholics kept the killer's head as a relic and tried to have him declared a saint.
The death of William of Orange forced Elizabeth to face reality. The new military commander on the block was Alexander Farnese, the duke of Parma, who was every bit as hard-line as Alba and probably the best soldier of his generation.
Tempers ran high in the Council as they argued in front of the queen over whether or not England should intervene, and the upshot was the Treaty of Nonsuch in August 1585, which
● Gave the Dutch rebels an army of 7,000 men led by the earl of Leicester, which would cost England £126,000 per year.
● Gave Elizabeth two fortresses and the town of Vlissingen (Flushing) as surety that she’d get her money back.
The treaty amounted to a declaration of war, but it was what Drake was up to on the far side of the world that probably tipped the balance.
Plundering with El Draco
Before the Treaty of Nonsuch (see the previous section) Philip had grabbed all English ships in Spanish ports on some flimsy pretext about needing them for some unspecified service. It all sounded a bit dodgy and was - this was actually a pre-emptive strike against England designed to make a point. In 1585 the queen ordered Francis Drake to Vigo in Spain to demand the release of the English ships.
Drake had just refitted a fleet of 20 ships including the 600-ton Elizabeth Bonaventure and the Vigo governor wasn’t expecting this sudden arrival of force. He handed over ships and crews and Drake probably should’ve gone home, but being Drake he had other ideas. We don’t know what instructions Elizabeth gave him, but the raid that followed was a plain message to Spain: don’t mess with the English navy.
Drake burned Spanish settlements in the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands, and on New Year’s Day 1586 he took the town of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola (today’s Haiti), hoping to ransom it back to the Spaniards for large amounts of cash. When that didn’t happen, Drake burned the place down and moved on to Cartagena and St Augustine in Florida.
In Florida he got an invitation from the newly set up colony at Roanoke and he arrived to find it in trouble. The colonists were running out of food and were surrounded by hostile Native Americans (Drake and his men would probably have called them heathens). The colony was abandoned and Drake took the colonists home, landing in Plymouth on 28 July 1586.
Leicester in the Low Countries
You'd expect that the leader of the English expeditionary force in the Netherlands would be a nobleman, but the Tudor style of government meant that noblemen with actual battle experience were thin on the ground. Leicester was therefore a bit of a rare bird - a nobleman who did have military experience. At first, the English did quite well, earning the duke of Parma's respect, but their efforts soon went pear-shaped. In September 1586 Philip Sidney, courtier and darling of the literary set, was killed at Zutphen (the silly man wasn't wearing leg armour - will they never learn?). After that, progress went downhill. Leicester lost the vital garrison at Sluys and in February 1586 made himself governor general with Dutch backing. This was clever because it looked to the world as if Elizabeth backed the Dutch all the way; in fact she was furious with Leicester for taking the title on and recalled him.
Drake lost 700 of his 1,700 man expedition, mostly from disease, and his backers only got 75 per cent of their expected return. He did, however, destroy a number of Spanish colonies and humiliate the viceroy of the Indies at very little cost to Elizabeth’s government. As an open act of war, Drake’s activities would be difficult to better.
Francis Drake has gone down in English history as the Elizabethan top seadog, a national hero. No doubt he had guts and was a brilliant sailor, but man-management wasn’t his thing and he was no team player. Even in an unruly and violent age, his men were allowed to behave appallingly in their raids on the Spanish colonies.
Preparing for Invasion
What were Philip Il’s options for a campaign against England?
● He could invade directly from Spain, hitting the south coast with 150 ships (the fleet he called the Armada) carrying 50,000 men.
● He could take advantage of the ongoing squabbles in Ireland (see Chapter 14) and use the country as a springboard for invasion, hitting England on two fronts from the south and the west.
● He could link up with Parma’s army in the Low Countries and hit England on two fronts from the south and the east.
By the beginning of 1587 Philip had decided on the last idea, but with modifications. The Spanish fleet would now sail up the Channel, collect Parma’s troops and invade from the east. But because he no longer had an ambassador in England, Philip had no good idea of the strength of Elizabeth’s defences.
Philip had problems:
● Parma didn’t like the plan. He had no deep water port in the Low Countries that could accommodate 150 ships and he told Philip so. Philip ignored him.
● The marquis of Santa Cruz, Philip’s administrator, was useless. He collected troops, gave them no provisions and was astounded when men deserted.
● Various Spanish towns were supposed to provide ships and guns, but they didn’t always, and the guns and ammunition supplied were of such a mixture of sizes and types that it became chaotic.
Talking tactics with Elizabeth
The queen and her Council knew that the Armada was being assembled but they didn’t know where and when it would strike. So they tried to cover all bases:
● John Hawkins was sent to patrol the Western Approaches (see Figure 15-2).
● Elizabeth ordered new ships to be built, like the Vanguard, Rainbow, Seven Stars and Popinjay.
● Elizabeth licensed more privateers.
● The queen unleashed Drake (see the following section).
Calculating the cost
The marquis of Santa Cruz was ready to launch Philip's fleet in 1587 but Philip dithered - he wasn't sure it was necessary and it was going to cost an arm and a leg. The original estimates were 4 million ducats (about £1 million) but various changes saw that rocket to 7 million and the actual cost was 12 million - for a plan that would fail.
Figure 15-2: The Channel and the south coast ports.
Firing the fire ships
England sent Drake to raid the Spanish forces, partly paid for by Elizabeth and partly by courtiers and merchants. As a fence-sitter, the queen continued to have doubts about whether she should’ve sent Drake even after he set sail.
Most of the Armada was being fitted out at Lisbon, but the forts along the Tagus river were too well fortified and Drake hit Cadiz, on Spain’s southwest coast, instead. There weren’t many ships here, but it was an important supply base for food, weapons, clothing and other necessities for a voyage (see ‘A life on the ocean waves’, later in this chapter, for life on board a ship).
Drake set fire to pinnaces (small boats) and sailed them into the harbour, packed with explosives. He destroyed 30 Spanish ships and the galleys (oared warships) sent out against him were no match for the seadog.
Sensibly, Drake didn’t try attacking the well-fortified town, commanded by the duke of Medina Sidonia, but sailed off to the Azores in the mid-Atlantic where he captured the huge treasure ship San Felipe, which paid for the whole expedition several times over.
The race-built galleon
If there was one man responsible for saving England from the Armada it was John Hawkins. As treasurer of the navy, he teamed up with a master shipwright, Richard Chapman, and designed the race-built galleon, pinched from Spanish blueprints, but modified. Hawkins' ships were lower in the water and more streamlined than anything in the Spanish navy. Their continuous gun decks meant that they were more deadly while at the same time giving the ships more stability. Hawkins also hit upon the idea of a double sheathing of oak planking below the waterline to lessen the effects of corrosion from barnacles and other sea creatures.
Although no one would know it until put to the test, the English ships could outrun and outmanoeuvre the heavier Spanish galleons and galleasses and would prove invaluable in the Channel fighting.
Drake’s comment on Cadiz is the famous, ‘I have singed the king of Spain’s beard.’ Spanish men were very proud of their beards, seeing them as a sign of macho virility. If Drake realised this his comment was psychologically devastating.
The attack on Cadiz put Philip’s plans back by a year. The losses were calculated at 172,000 ducats (£60,000) but even worse was the fact that with preparation costs running at 300,000 ducats a month, any delay was disastrous.
Losing Santa Cruz, and gaining Medina Sidonia
The death of Santa Cruz wasn’t much of a loss, really. Philip’s man was out of his depth with an operation on the scale of the Armada. He died of typhus fever, which had broken out in the Spanish fleet, and was replaced by the duke of Medina Sidonia. Even so, the loss of Santa Cruz brought everything to a standstill until the new appointment.
Because the Armada ultimately failed, people have tended to write off Medina Sidonia as a failure too. In fact, he was a brilliant administrator and worked tirelessly to turn the flagging enterprise around. If Hawkins made the English victory possible with his revolutionary warship designs (see the sidebar ‘The race-built galleon’), Medina Sidonia made the Armada launch possible in the first place.
Brilliant and energetic though Medina Sidonia was, he didn’t think the Armada would work and wrote to Philip to beg off, claiming (rightly) a lack of naval experience. Philip refused to let him off the hook and Philip’s aides intercepted more forthright letters from Medina Sidonia; the king never saw them.
So the admiral set to work. He increased the number of ships from 104 to 130; he nearly doubled the size of his army to 19,000 men; he provided food for the troops; and he improved the powder and shot problem for the guns.
Smashing the Armada
After leaving, the Spanish fleet sailed in a crescent formation through the Bay of Biscay towards England’s south coast, with the slower transports in the centre rear and the faster galleasses on the wings. The problem facing the English was that they couldn’t be sure what Medina Sidonia plans were - whether he intended a direct invasion somewhere in the south or whether he intended to link up with Parma in the Netherlands.
Sighting the Spaniards
The English lord admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, was based at Plymouth on the Devon coast, because from there he could strike out against the Armada as soon as it was sighted and carry on a running gun battle up the Channel as far as was necessary. Howard also kept a squadron off the coast of Flanders, opposite the duke of Parma’s position, to make sure he didn’t break out from there.
The Armada sailed down the Tagus on 20 May with 132 ships. They were a motley collection of huge galleons (like Medina Sidonia’s flagship, the San Martin de Portugal), galleasses, galleys, armed merchantmen and grain ships. Philip called this the Enterprise of England and it was underway at last. Its crescent formation when it was first seen off the south coast of England must have been terrifying.
Beacons were lit all over the south coast, linking up to others further inland, so everyone knew the Spaniards were coming.
It’s not likely that Francis Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe and refused to give up his game even though the Spanish fleet had been sighted. That said, he knew the Devon seas like the back of his hand and knew he had plenty of time before engaging the enemy.
But Medina Sidonia had problems. He had no clear instructions on how to link up with Parma (Philip told him God would sort it out - thanks, Your Serene Majesty; nice one!) and an appalling storm off Galicia, northwest Spain, meant that the fleet had to put in to Corunna for repairs.
Preparing Dad's Army
The Tudors had got rid of nobles’ private armies, and apart from a handful of men who’d fought in Scotland or France very little military experience existed in England. Everybody was afraid of Parma because of his warfaring reputation and everybody was relying on the navy to prevent him landing.
By the end of June the county militias had been organised. They were led by the lords lieutenant and were badly armed and equipped. The plan was that
● A third of them would defend the beaches - the best place to stop an invasion.
● A third would form the second wave of defence if the Spaniards got inland.
● A third would fall back on London to defend the queen, who was already gearing up for the speech of her life (see the later section ‘Inspiring the troops’).
A life on the ocean waves
You wouldn't have liked working on a Tudor warship. Check out the Mary Rose Museum at Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard for an idea of what it was like. For most of the time you were cramped below decks in the dark with rats, fleas and lice as well as the livestock you'd brought on board for food - chickens, geese and sheep. The water had to be rationed - drinking seawater kills your kidneys - and the usual daily food was ship's biscuits infested with slimy little creatures called weevils. Scrubbing the decks was a daily chore and you needed to be quick, strong and agile to climb the rigging to the mast heads 9 metres (30 feet) up in high winds and driving rain.
Tudor warships didn't have hammocks (canvas beds) until the mid 1590s, so men slept on the decks between their guns. Guns came in lots of different sizes and weights with a whole variety of names - culverins, sakers, minions, falcons, port pieces, fowlers and bases. All guns fired round shot (iron cannonballs) designed to smash through the hulls of enemy ships. On firing, the guns jolted backwards with the recoil and so they had to be held fast by ropes. The noise was deafening and some men permanently lost their hearing. Some Spanish eyewitnesses said that the English could fire their cannon as fast as the Spaniards could fire their muskets.
Keeping the crescent
The appalling weather kept Howard’s fleet penned in and then blew him off course far to the south, so he had to put in to Plymouth again to restock with food. Luckily for him, Medina Sidonia’s approach was made at the speed of his slowest troop carriers so the English still had time to sail out against the Spanish.
Throughout July Howard’s navy bombarded the crescent formation of the Armada, snapping at its heels as it made its way up the Channel. Fearing that the Spaniards would land on and capture the Isle of Wight, Howard divided his command into four. He led one squadron on board the Ark Royal and Drake, Hawkins and Martin Frobisher led the others on board the Triumph, the biggest ship in either fleet.
The Spanish naval battle system was different from the English. Medina Sidonia’s tactic was to fire on an enemy ship (a broadside) then get close enough for soldiers to swing across by rope and fight hand-to-hand on the enemy’s decks. The English system, by contrast, was to continue firing until a ship sank or surrendered and dart away out of range if the going got tough.
While the others prevented the Armada from sailing into the Solent where the Mary Rose had gone down 43 years earlier (see Chapter 3), Drake hit their right wing and drove them further north-east.
But despite the superior English gunnery, the crescent formation was still intact and essentially, the Armada was still on its original course. Gravelines would change all that.
Battling off Gravelines
When he got to Calais Roads, Medina Sidonia was appalled to see no sign of Parma, who should have been on the coast to meet him as he put in to harbour. The general had been delayed and anyway would not put to sea as long as the English navy was still harassing the Armada. He wasn’t to know that Howard’s men were desperately short of shot and probably wouldn’t have been able to withstand a direct assault by the Armada.
The English admiral sent in his fire ships, which exploded in the crescent formation, sank a few ships and scattered the rest.
Then, off Gravelines in France at the end of July, Howard went in for the kill. Only three or four Spanish ships were sunk but most of the rest were made unseaworthy. The casualty rate on board each ship probably wasn’t very high, but the ships themselves scattered, leaderless, and were forced into the North Sea by rough winds.
The Enterprise of England had failed.
Limping home
Many of the Armada ships never got back to Spain. They sailed all the way round the British coast and many were wrecked on the treacherous rocks of the Western Isles of Scotland (see Figure 15-3 for a map of their route from start to finish). The rocks around Britain are still littered with Spanish wrecks. Some landed on the Irish coast and were greeted as brothers in arms by fellow Catholics who hated the English. In other places, locals cut the Spaniards’ throats as they waded ashore.
About 15,000 men had died, mostly by drowning, and the huge cost of the whole project threatened to bankrupt Spain.
Inspiring the troops
About 20,000 men were ready to defend London if necessary. Even with the fleet scattered, the Council knew that if the Armada could put in to neutral Norwegian ports they might still refit and get Parma across to England.
On 9 August 1588 Elizabeth made speech at Tilbury, east of London. She knew that a renewed attack by the Armada wasn’t likely, but the men who heard her speak that day knew no such thing and probably feared the worst. She wore a breastplate and backplate, rode a white horse and waved a sword. The queen told her men:
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any other Prince of Europe dare invade the borders of my realm . . .
Elizabeth was deafened by the cheers and applause and her speech has gone down as one of the great moments in history. Check out Cate Blanchett’s delivery in Elizabeth. She’s about 20 years too young for the queen at this point in her life, but catches the combination of bravado and vulnerability beautifully.
Figure 15-3: The Armada’s attack route and battles.
Winning the Battle, Not the War
If this was a Hollywood film, this chapter - indeed this book - would end here, with triumph and success. History isn’t like that. The show must go on.
Considering another invasion
Could a Spanish invasion have worked in 1588? No, because
● English seamanship and gunnery made Medina Sidonia’s plan to link up with Parma impossible.
● Bad weather helped the English enormously.
● Bad Spanish planning meant that there wasn’t much of a Plan A, still less a Plan B. No one had any idea how to get Parma’s troop transports across the Channel.
Crossing the 21 miles of water to England has always proved a problem. Napoleon couldn’t do it in 1804; neither could Hitler in 1940. It only worked in 1688 because the invading army of William of Orange was actually invited over. The last actual enemy who’d managed the crossing was William, duke of Normandy, in 1066.
Lining up for a rematch ?
Philip was, of course, distraught, believing he must have offended God somehow to explain the Armada’s loss. But although shaken, he was also stirred and he fought back, entirely rebuilding the fleet by 1593 and improving West Indian and South American defences, so that when Drake attacked the Spanish Caribbean in 1595 he came away empty-handed.
Meanwhile, under threat of yet another invasion, Elizabeth reluctantly spent money updating Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight to make it a state-of-the art fortress (find out more about the castle in Chapter 19).
The plight of the queen's sailors
More sailors died on board the English ships after the Armada was scattered than during the whole of the action, mostly from plague and typhus. The casualty list was nearly as high as that of the Spaniards. The English sailors stayed on board because Elizabeth refused to pay them, whereas a bitterly disappointed Philip nevertheless welcomed his men home as if they were returning heroes.
Another Armada was launched from Ferrol in Spain in 1597, with 136 ships and 9,000 soldiers. Again, vicious storms destroyed it off the Lizard, the Cornish Peninsula, and no invasion took place.
Dispensing with Drake
In the autumn of 1588 the English plan was to smash the remnants of Philip’s Armada, moored in Santander, Spain. The queen sent Francis Drake to get the job done but he exceeded his authority, as he often did, and he attempted to put the pretender Dom Antonio onto the Portuguese throne, which Philip had held since 1580. The deal was that Antonio was supposed to have a huge following in Portugal (not true) and would give the English all kinds of trade benefits (which never happened).
The campaign’s backers lost a lot of cash, the queen herself losing £20,000. Drake’s career was effectively over and Elizabeth decided that from now on, war would be conducted solely by warships under direct orders from the Council.
For the queen herself, the last years of her reign lay ahead (see Chapter 16).